hospitalitystyle.com

(Winter 2010) posted on Thu Dec 16, 2010 EST

Watch This Space: Opulence is too much. Austerity is too little. CitizenM Glasgow’s focus on luxurious essentials is just right for take-control travelers.

By Mary Scoviak

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At citizenM Glasgow, guests can relax on Charles and Ray Eames lounge chairs before taking their made-to-order coffee back to their rooms and customizing the ambience of their home away from home with the MoodPads by Philips. That's a lot of bang for rates starting around $100 a night. It's also a snapshot of where hospitality design is headed in 2011.

 Even if recovery takes hold, the next 12 months won't see most owners throwing money at design. Nor are guests likely to scale back their expectations, especially as hotel prices creep up. Caught in the middle, hotel operators like citizenM and its go-to design agency, Concrete Architectural Associates, will be delivering five-star impact on mid-spend budgets by paring away the non-essentials, developing FF&E that does double duty, scaling down seating and focusing their time and money on what matters most to travelers. The trend now is to invest rather than buy and to make sure each line item justifies itself by driving occupancy, rate, guest satisfaction or, preferably, all of the above.

 It's not surprising that, with this guest-centric focus, guest rooms will be the design stars of 2011. As with its two older sisters in the operator's home town, Amsterdam, the creative process for citizenM Glasgow started with the private rather than the public spaces. “That's rare in the conventional architecture arena,” says Rob Wagemans, creative director and founder, Concrete Architectural Associates, also based in Amsterdam. “Normally, it happens the other way around. But we used the guest rooms as the building blocks for the rest of the property because a great bed and a clean bathroom are the essence of the hotel experience.”

To create rooms that offer “high luxury” for an affordable price, citizenM and Concrete decided to have modular rooms prefabricated offsite. Manufactured by the UK's Sisk+Corus Modular Construction, the outside measurements of each of the citizenM Glasgow's 198 rooms was restricted for ease of transport to the city-center building site. This exacting uniformity not only saved money by leveraging volume purchasing power, but it also meant the entire inventory of rooms—complete with wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor windows—could be delivered within 44 weeks.